They did the same thing with my P-47 put in a folding prop in with the ARF why I don't know when I get back to work on it I will be putting on a a thin electric prop. I would just switch it out like you mentioned.

Don't know what they are thinking using a folding prop for a 3D plane it's not needed they must have a surplus, and this is one way to get rid of them.

I will be powering well though. The specs call for a 2810 180W motor ... I shall fit a 2836 300W job .... but certainly do not expect 3D with it ... in fact 3D doesn't interest me - but full-on aerobatics does.

Well .... it flies very well on the motor I picked and a fixed 10x6 ... BUT what a twitchy plane.
She was balanced as manual ...

It's a model to keep attention totally otherwise she will bite !

Flight ended when the colour scheme defeated me in the clear blue sky, bright sun and deep snow landscape. Close in - you could tell which way up ... let her get away and the scheme dissolves away ...

On final turn to land on a narrow road ... I lost orientation of her at distance and she went in ... I shut down throttle before she hit ...

All I can say is the ply / wood used in the construction - I'd already noted was brittle and very poor ....... it just disintegrated ....

To give an idea - the cowling which is thin GRP is still in good condition, albeit gelcoat cracked / chipped. But the 'wood' structure it was attached to ... all in tiny bits ...

Top wing has snapped at wing rib outboard of cabanes ...... right where the rib was missing .... (factory missed fitting the centre part of a rib - the LE / TE parts are there, but the centre between the spars was missing)

Repairs will not only be to rebuild fuselage front end, wing back together ... but also rip of covering and redo in a more vivid orientation style ...

The Fuselage will be repaired by fitting long beams back into good structure and leading forward to new motor mount.... 2 each side. There will be a top beam inserted to carry the top sheeting and a half moon formers to create the curved form. Top / sides will get 1/16th balsa sheet to form.

Motor was always a bad mount system - I now have opportunity to fit a better mount ...

Depending on how much covering is destroyed on fuselage - I may keep the fuselage scheme and change the wings. The main thing is to get the top and bottom enough different to be immediately obvious !!
I also have now no excuse but to fit own rib !!

For those who haven't seen this model - it follows the interlocking light play construction that Japanese Kits like Pilot used .... trouble is the chinese are not using the same high quality lite-ply that Pilot used.

The fuselage nose is made of battery tray ... firewall ... and interlocking parts .....

Here you can see the flimsy battery tray ...

the only reason that is still in one piece ? Is the 2100 3S that was velcro'd to it !

Here's a picture showing the interlocking motor area ... this is similar to rest of plane ...

Servo area ...

Here are the photos of the crashed model :

and the bag of bits collected ..

Basically the plane is a lightened shell with brittle thin sheet and then plastic film.

I am worried what I find for wing construction when I strip back top wing for repair ...

The delay is giving me time to work out a reconstruction design.

Idea from the previous post has been refined to :

4 horizontal 1/4 x 1/4 pine beams going back from firewall into main fuselage. That creates the box for battery tray to fix to with vertical webs. Light balsa sheet to finish sides.
Top rounded decking to be pink closed cell foam to create the form ... light balsa sheet over ... then film.

The hardest part will be the angled bottom and matching the battery hatch ...

The top wing break needs checking back further than just the immediately obvious ... but should be mainly applying doubler bracing to glueing back together the snapped spars and sheeting. The missing rib of course to be inserted.

Cowling - I have Gel Coat resin for the boat I can use ... so that's not a problem.

Motor needs to be dissasembled and cleaned ....

Like I say - once I get Jig saw back - it's on its way back in the air.

Sorry to see the carnage of this pretty plane!
I think when the do the plywood they heat it to speed up the glue time, or something I agree the plywood on a lot of these planes from China is very brittle. Seems to be dried out, but the balsa is real soft and the grain is nice like to see my LHS have a supply of this balsa.
Ya these little Bipes are a handful needs to have some power on to avoid tip stalls, and be constantly on the sticks.
Good luck with the rebuild sure you will rebuild her better than she was.

Nasty, i think it must have hit very hard judging by the way the cowl has been thoroughly crushed and the prop sheared on both blades, that was no minor impact.

I've got the Precision Aerobatics version of the Ultimate which is just a shade bigger than the one in this thread and slightly heavier. It's a real pleasure to fly, it's capable of the most extreme 3D manoeuvres but if you reduce the throws it's almost like a trainer, it will land quite literally at a walking pace. It's got no bad habits at all and wont drop a wing no matter how hard you provoke it. In fact to illustrate just how nice it flies I had a radio failure a few weeks back doing a slow pass about 20ft high and the plane landed itself, only damage was a screw holding the landing gear was pulled out.

I cant see why this one should be much different, only thing I can guess is the CG was too far back, or the elevator had too much throw and/or too little exponential. My ultimate balances 30% back measured at the tip of the top wing. For full 3D flying I've got 45 deg throws and 60-70% expo, for sport flying you would want much less throw but about 30% expo is a good idea IMHO

Jetplaneflyer ... she went in near vertical but with throttle pulled back ... from about 50ft ... the crash was into about 1ft snow and then ice hard ploughed field.

The cowl is VERY thin GRP ... no thicker than a lexan body on a car ! It's probably why it's in good condition - it flexed enough ...

The ply used in this model is so brittle that when I was fitting the wing struts - the ply tabs just FELL away when trying to drill for the supplied screws ! The pieces recovered - you can rub to splinters in your fingers ...
I had to fit a second star motor mount on other side of mount ply to give it strength to carry the motor ... I'd read on another forum that guy had his front end disintegrate when he test run his motor ! I don't like to beef up things as you just move the stress point along ..

The overall weight of this model including the 2836 motor and prop is only slightly more than my 50mm EDF !

She will fly again ... but with a redesigned and shock absorbing front end ... I will also make motor mount so fitting motor is not the baby fingers fiddly job of the original ... thinking to get the alloy frame mount from HK in fact ... so all I do is rebuild the straight fuselage .. GRP the cowl ... then fit HK mount ... this can then be adjusted for thrust lines etc. in trials.

This flies GREAT ... no dispute ... but it is certainly not a machine to take on lightly unless you marginally power it .. power it as she is intended to be and she's something else.

Yeah, some balsa/ply ARF's dont take an impact well at all. I had a Hobby king Pitts that shattered in a similar way to your Ultimate in what was only a moderate impact.

The Ultimate I'm flying has a lot of carbon fibre in the structure which may make it more crash resistant but so far I've not had to find out. I still think the twitchiness you found with yours may be down to RC set up. My Ultimate (which is 40" span, 39oz flying weight and has 480W of power spinning a 14" prop) is a pleasure to fly and never a handful at all. Use of lots of exponential makes all the difference.

Steve

PS... My last post lost some meaning due to the overzealous forum 'naughty word filter' deciding that 'puzzycat' (zz added to bypass filter) was a rude word.. and it changed it to 'cat' 'It's a real cat' just doesn't have the same meaning as 'it's a real puzzycat'.

If it was the Pitts I'm thinking of - it would have come from same factory ... so you know what I mean.

CF ? There is no CF in my Ultimate anywhere.

I agree that twitchiness is probably down to my not using enough Expo, ( I had 30% set) ....... but to be honest - I was flying Pitts, Skymasters and other machines for display work back in 80's ... 90's without any Expo .......
I also had 300W power up front instead of the recc'd motors 180W ... but in my defence - the point was to have a motor that would give me much more range in throttling and capability than the moderate recc'd power level. The model is intended to provide part of the show-case display work when we sort meetings etc. to introduce to public the new Latvian RC club ...

I was talking about my Ultimate, which is made by Precision Aerobatics.

I'd have expected 30% expo to be enough is you were using normal 'sports/aerobatics' control deflections

Hi sorry - I should have put that better ... I know you were talking about your model.

I was using the manuals advised settings ............ and I have the CoG measured and marked on the wing exactly as per manual.

The crash was due to loss of orientation with the colour scheme. It's winter here and any model with a large amount of white is not so good idea !! The colours are in very different shapes top / bottom - but at distance along with the white merges ... and that is what happened to me.

The twitchiness I put down to a good power margin and the fixed prop ... the prop wash MUST be better than the folder they supplied ... and I'm using a much more powerful motor than manual recc'ds.
IMHo - that gives more authority to those large surfaces.

I'm away on assignment for a few weeks on Monday ... so have plenty of time to think about repairs .......